Brüder, Geister und Fossilien: Eduard Mörikes Erfahrungen der Umwelt by Thomas Wolf (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.4, 2003 1049 Bruder, Geister und Fossilien: Eduard Mbrikes Erfahrungen der Umwelt. By Thomas Wolf. (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 108) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2001. vi + 202pp. ?28.63. ISBN 3-484-32108-3 (pbk). Morike's poetry, like that of his contemporaries Droste and Heine, shares with its readers the minutest details of the author's everyday life, and Thomas Wolf's book, which explores three aspects of Morike's life in equally minute and affectionate de? tail, is therefore welcome. Admittedly, the aspects dealt with in Wolf's loosely linked essays seem incommensurable. An account of Morike's difficultrelationships with his four brothers sits oddly alongside studies of his interest in the supernatural (intertwined with a survey of his relationship with Justinus Kerner) and of the passion for collecting fossils which occupied him in the 1840s. They are united by the author's intention to document the engagement of the supposedly reclusive Morike with the world around him. Ofthe Morike brothers, August died at the age of 17, while Karl and Adolph caused Eduard endless worry through their misdemeanours. Adolph, a carpenter, took to dissipation and fraud, and eventually lost contact with his siblings; Karl, a civil servant, got himself into political trouble through scarcely believable folly and dishonesty, which he compounded by blackmail and forgery,and his death from tuberculosis in 1848 must have caused some relief. Morike found refuge from these distresses in his complementary hobbies, a late-Romantic fascination with the spirit world and a realistic interest in fossils (in which he was conscious offollowing Goethe). The parsonage at Cleversulzbach was thought to be haunted by the ghost of a previous incumbent. Strange noises, shufflingfeet, rappings, and even shots were heard whenever visitors came to stay. Had Wolf treated these matters less flippantly,he might have enquired into the probable connections between poltergeist phenomena and emotional disturbance , and concluded that the Morike household was even less idyllic than its image. He offersmore interpretative suggestions in his chapter on fossil-hunting, forwhich he has examined the fivehundred or so surviving specimens of Morike's fossil collec? tion, and concludes that Morike's interest in palaeontology was aesthetic rather than scientific. It would have been good to learn more about Morike's scientific assumptions , his conception of geological epochs (in one place, perhaps jokingly, he estimates a fossil's age at eight thousand years), and their relation to the Bible: Wolf directs us to the poem 'Gottliche Reminiszenz', which fails back on biblical chronology. Although an overall argument is lacking, and although Wolf concentrates on bio? graphical details rather than exploring links with Morike's poetry or with wider intellectual currents, he has given us a readable, attractive, and suggestive book, presenting material that is otherwise scattered throughout the Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe and numerous far-flungpublications. Although slight by comparison with Susanne Fliegner's much more coherent and wide-ranging study, Der Dichter und die Dilettanten: Eduard Morikes Lyrik und die biirgerlicheGeselligkeitskultur des ig. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), Wolf's book forms a useful supplement to Fliegner's important monograph. St John's College, Oxford Ritchie Robertson Nestroy: Die Launen des Gliickes. By Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Vienna: Zsolnay . 2001. 175 pp. ?15.90. ISBN 3-552-05173-2 (hbk). Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler's monograph, published in 2001 to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Nestroy's birth, is a multi-layered and undogmatic, enlightening and thought-provoking piece of work. It belongs in a small category of critical studies that have appeal for both the specialist and the lay reader in that it is written ...